Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”

Paul Krugman: The Forgotten Millions

More than three years after we entered the worst economic slump since the 1930s, a strange and disturbing thing has happened to our political discourse: Washington has lost interest in the unemployed.

Jobs do get mentioned now and then – and a few political figures, notably Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House, are still trying to get some kind of action. But no jobs bills have been introduced in Congress, no job-creation plans have been advanced by the White House and all the policy focus seems to be on spending cuts.

So one-sixth of America’s workers – all those who can’t find any job or are stuck with part-time work when they want a full-time job – have, in effect, been abandoned.

Robert Reich: As the Global Economy Trembles, Our Nation’s Capital Fiddles

Why isn’t Washington responding?

The world’s third largest economy suffers a giant earthquake, tsunami, and radiation dangers. A civil war in Libya and tumult in the Middle East cause crude-oil prices to climb. Poor harvests around the world make food prices soar.

All this means higher prices. American consumers, still reeling from job losses and wage cuts, will be hit hard. (Wholesale food prices surged almost 4 percent in February, the largest upward spike in more than a quarter century.)

Even before these global shocks the U.S. recovery was fragile. Consumer confidence is at a five-month low. Housing prices continue to drop. More than 14 million Americans remain jobless, and the ratio of employed to our total population is at an almost unprecedented low.

Lisa Hajjar: Pvt Manning proves ‘slippery slope’

Treatment of the US soldier shows there is a fine line between torture of enemy combatants and American citizens.

Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking a massive trove of classified material to WikiLeaks, has been imprisoned since May 2010. The treatment to which he has been subjected, including protracted isolation, systematic humiliations and routinised sleep deprivation, got more extreme last week when the commander of the brig at Quantico, Virginia, imposed on him a regime of forced nakedness at night and during an inspection of his cell every morning until his clothing is returned.

These types of abusive tactics were authorised by the Bush administration for use on foreign detainees captured in the war on terror, on the theory that causing “debilitation, disorientation and dread” would produce “learned helplessness” and make them more susceptible and responsive to interrogators’ questioning.

Eugene Robunson: Spent Fuel’s Toxic Legacy

The most urgent focus of Japan’s worsening nuclear crisis is the threat from radioactive fuel that has already been used in the Fukushima Daiichi reactors and awaits disposal. In the United States, the nuclear industry has amassed about 70,000 tons of such potentially deadly waste material-and we have nowhere to put it.

U.S. officials’ increasingly dire assessment of the situation in Japan stems largely from the fact that spent fuel rods-which were stored in pools of water to keep them cool-have apparently become uncovered. The material is “cool” only in the relative sense: Once exposed to air, the fuel rods rapidly heat up and release large amounts of radiation.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Fukushima USA: Hell or High Water

Some politicians are so determined to serve their corporate patrons that even disasters like Fukushima can’t lessen their anti-government zeal. The expression for that kind of determination is “Come hell or high water.” Now, thanks to deregulation and government downsizing, we’ve seen both.

As tragedy unfolds in Fukushima, an ideological struggle’s being waged here at home. A CBS News headline reads “Nuclear Safety Expert: It Could Happen Here.” The Nation‘s Christian Parenti offers a piece called “Nuclear Hubris: Could Japan’s Disaster Happen Here? Experts are being quoted on both sides of the debate. The Brattleboro Reformer‘s “Could It Happen Here?” piece reflects a special anxiety, since the Vermont Yankee reactor down the road in Vernon is a General Electric Mark I like the reactors at Fukushima. Other “can it happen here?” stories have appeared in Pennsylvania, Grand Rapids, Detroit, South Carolina, San Francisco, Michigan, New Hampshire, and undoubtedly elsewhere around the country.

The question urgently needs to be asked. There are at least 23 similar reactors in the United States, and some them are forty years old. And “can it happen here?” stories are appearing in other parts of the world, too, like Canada, Great Britain, India, Russia, Australia, and Armenia.

Jack M. Balkin: Bradley Manning, Barack Obama and the National Surveillance State

In 2006, Sandy Levinson and I predicted that the next president, whether Democratic or Republican, would ratify and continue many of President George W. Bush’s war on terrorism policies. The reason, we explained, had less to do with the specific events of September 11th, and more to do with the fact that the United States was in the process of expanding the National Security State created after World War II into something we called the National Surveillance State, featuring huge investments in electronic surveillance and various end runs around traditional Bill of Rights protections and expectations about procedure. These end runs included public private cooperation in surveillance and exchange of information, expansion of the state secrets doctrine, expansion of administrative warrants and national security letters, a system of preventive detention, expanded use of military prisons, extraordinary rendition to other countries, and aggressive interrogation techniques outside of those countenanced by the traditional laws of war.

The reasons for the creation of the national surveillance state were multiple; they concerned the rise of digital networks, changes in the technology of warfare, and the concomitant rise of networks of non-state actors as serious threats to national security. These problems would present themselves to any President, whether liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican.

Cliff Schecter: Prescribed pain by corporate America

Greed has become a foundational structure of the US economy – exemplified by the pharmaceutical industry.

During the ultimate scene of betrayal in the movie Wall Street, a young stockbroker named Bud Fox learns that his idol, the golden-calf worshipping Gordon Gekko, has not only lied to him but left his father’s company exposed to the whims and hunger of the wolves of Wall Street. In a climactic moment, Fox asks Gekko, “how much is enough? How many yachts can you water ski behind?”

Even though this film was mid-1980s fare, one can once again repeat that old refrain, the more things change the more they stay the same. Perhaps not for the actor who played Bud Fox, Charlie Sheen, who should share Natalie Portman’s Oscar for real-time transformation into the Black Swan.

But for the rest of us, who have watched as greed has become the foundational structure upon which much of our modern economy is built, it is often difficult to see how we might close the Pandora’s Box and return to saner times. You know, back when being Donald Trump wasn’t considered an asset in a hair-club-for-men commercial, much less a race to be President of the United States.